School funding lawsuit looms large for Texas

Saturday

AUSTIN - The bitter redistricting battle has been the biggest Texas legislative story this year, but a bigger legal fight seems to be looming in 2012.

It's the public education funding lawsuit filed by more than half of the 1,029 school districts in Texas, including Amarillo, Lubbock and about 100 other districts in West Texas.

For David Hinojosa, lead school-funding litigator for the San Antonio-based Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, this is why the majority of school districts in Texas are revolting against the state:

"The state has left many Texas children behind by blatantly defying its constitutional duty to fully support their education," Hinojosa said. "Every Texas child should have the opportunity to go to college and this lawsuit will ensure that opportunity."

In short, the current funding system is inequitable and must be fixed, Hinojosa said.

The defense fund is expected to be a key player in the upcoming legal fight because 25 years ago it filed - and eventually won - the first school funding lawsuit against the state. The fund has represented the poorest of the property tax-poor school districts in each of the previous five lawsuits against the state of Texas.

In all, four lawsuits have been or will be filed this year, and the Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition represents, by far, the largest number of school districts, 380 and counting.

However, Hinojosa and Lauren Cook of the Austin-based Equity Center, the umbrella group for the Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition, said they expect that at some point all lawsuits will be merged into one, just like the dozen or so plaintiffs in the yearlong redistricting battle did earlier this year.

Most members of the Panhandle/South Plains legislative delegation said it is unfortunate the state is being sued because the Legislature has done everything possible to adequately fund the public schools.

"It wasn't the perfect fix, a perfect solution to the problem, but we made some progress," Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, said in regard to his Senate Bill 1, which funds the public education system in the current fiscal biennium and includes a $4 billion cut compared to the previous two years.

However, like many of his colleagues and school administrators everywhere, Duncan acknowledged the funding formulas are not working the way they should.

For instance, under current law, money the state spends per student varies widely between districts, with some getting more than $12,000 a year while others get as little as $4,100, according to figures provided by the Lubbock Independent School District.

"That illustrates the problem that some schools get more money than others," Duncan said. "There are inequities in the system and we need to fix them."

As he did in this year's session, if re-elected next year, he intends to propose a statewide property tax to fund the schools because it would make the funding more equitable, Duncan said.

In this year's session his proposal went nowhere, mainly because of a $27 billion budget shortfall, redistricting, voter ID, sanctuary cities and other contentious issues the lawmakers tackled.

Rep. Jim Landtroop, R-Plainview, who along with a dozen of his House colleagues joined the Democratic minority in voting against Duncan's bill, said that in a way he is glad the state is being sued.

"I think the suit will force us to come up with a more equitable system," said Landtroop, who currently represents 57 school districts in his largely rural House District 85. "The funding system we have now is quite unfair to many school districts, especially to rural districts like the ones I represent."

Retiring Rep. Warren Chisum, author of the legislation most school administrators see as the root of the problem, said he also welcomes the litigation.

"It seems like we are sued every five years, and maybe this time we'll get it right," Chisum, R-Pampa, said.

In the 2006 special session, facing a Texas Supreme Court deadline to pass a school funding bill, the Legislature approved Chisum's bill that reduced local property taxes - the main source of revenue for funding the schools - by a third.

The problem with such legislation is that a business tax expected to make up for the lost revenue did not live up to its billing, mainly because of the sharp economic downturn of the last three years, Chisum explained.

"No one saw the economic downturn coming," he said. "And we couldn't increase taxes because the voters told us they were taxed enough already."

To comment on this story:

enrique.rangel@morris.com • 512-673-7553

leesha.faulkner@lubbockonline.com • 766-8706

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